


how to carry that weight

by honeybearbee



Category: Sherlock Holmes (Downey films)
Genre: M/M, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-22
Updated: 2017-07-22
Packaged: 2018-12-05 06:12:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11572032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honeybearbee/pseuds/honeybearbee





	how to carry that weight

Its days like these that make it hard for John Watson to live with Sherlock Holmes.

Already it pushes at the lines of decency that the early mornings are sometimes filled with most senseless scratches and rattles ever extracted from such a beautiful instrument as the violin. The most frustrating part of that is that Watson knows Holmes can be absolutely divine in his musicianship, yet chooses not to, picking and careening up and down broken scales in an uncanny imitation of the chaos whirling inside his head during a case.

The experimentation on Gladstone wouldn’t be so harrowing for Watson if he didn’t know that Holmes is an expert chemist, but it still makes him wildly uneasy. The scorch marks on the walls can be painted over, the tables replaced or reused, though what to do about the bullet pocks in Holmes’s rooms, Watson doesn’t know. Poor Mrs. Hudson will tear her hair if she ever moves the cabinet Watson moved to cover the offending area.

Watson even has to fill the cracks of Holmes’s decency, or lack thereof. His sniping at poor, crying women who stumble into 221b for his help have no need of further misery heaped upon them by his inability to understand the workings of human emotion, not matter the amount of prevarication and distorting of facts. It is Holmes who solves the cases, but it is Watson who apologizes, bends and bows to put a human face on the man.

These things are tolerable, with practice, and a certain endearing of the complex man that Holmes is. It’s not the endurance of his numerous idiosyncrasies, or the morphine, or the cocaine bottle. It’s not the shuttered looks from the people they pass in the street, the ones that scrape at Watson’s skin and make him feel like they can see every tiny dark thing he’s ever thought of Holmes, and drug out into the rare sun of London.

It is hard when Holmes joins him for morning tea in the sitting room, because he forgets to fully tie up his ratty dressing robe. His hair is a mussed mess and Watson can hardly care to notice anything else because Holmes wears his shirts to bed, and it would be indecent to allow any tell that just once, he’d take it back and wear it without washing it first, just to feel what it was like to have something Holmes touched so intimately against him.

He watches the inky, deep laugh lines form in Holmes’s face, reading aloud from the paper a particularly idiotic Scotland Yard blunder, and Watson smiles back and wills his drink to cool his insides.

It is hard when they’re on a case and Watson can’t help but stay pressed as close as he can to Holmes, hiding around corners, waiting to leap at their quarry. Holmes uses his shoulder as a brace for his spyglass, a level surface to aim his pistol, a makeshift pillow when he’s been foolish enough to get knocked and bloody in the head. Even delirious and half dead from being beaten in the boxing ring, he’s still damnably beautiful and perfectly oblivious. He pats Watson’s arm and runs his hand down to the fingers measuring his thready pulse, always saying “My dear, faithful Watson” in that slip-sliding, entirely distracting way of his. Never was it “My sweet Watson”, and it wasn’t more than fleeting touches.

If one day he and Holmes could take the place of the clean, ersatz version of themselves Watson pens in his stories, it would be a considerable challenge to stay put. He would be free to fawn and drift after Holmes and not fear the detective finding out his secret because he would have none.

“Yes,” Watson thought wryly, leafing through his journals, “you certainly have it better, old chap.”


End file.
